


Isthmus

by spqr



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No Plot Only Vibes, Sith Qui-Gon Jinn, do not ask me where anakin is, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 17:15:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30075606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: “Alive, your old master is,” Yoda says, as the Qui-Gon in the hologram turns, red 'saber in hand, robes flapping in an invisible wind. “Go to him, you will. In you, restore his trust.”And betray him, he doesn’t say, but Obi-Wan hears it anyways. Betray him.
Relationships: Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 15
Kudos: 152





	Isthmus

The natives of the planet Isthmus have 2,817 words to describe cries of pain. Obi-Wan, over the course of his year-long sojourn in the monsoon-soaked refugee camp which serves as the planet’s capital, makes efforts to translate them into Basic, but it’s a nigh-impossible task. Pain, for his species, defies language. Unravels language. The closest approximations he can come up with, conversing with the tall, treelike Isthmuns in the rain-drummed shelter of his tent, are imitated screams of wordless agony, which vary in pitch, intensity, and duration, but come nowhere close to articulation. Obi-Wan senses that it’s a fruitless undertaking, trying to establish a workable dictionary, but still, somehow, for some reason, he’s unable to abandon it.

 _AUUUUUUUGGGHHHHhhhhhhngg,_ he copies down on his pad. _rrrRRRRN --_ a short, cut-off breath, a desperate inhalation -- _AAWWRhnn,_ fading to tense, pained whimpering. He will never deliver this to anyone, he knows. Not the Council, not the Archivist. It’s childish, embarrassing. Like the journal kept by a pubescent padawan, only instead of teenage crushes Obi-Wan is obsessively seeking a way to document his own pain.

He’s recalled to Coruscant before he can find one.

Time passes differently in the dark beneath the Theed generator complex. Obi-Wan can’t say if he lies there for hours or days or for the space of a few seconds. He only knows three things. He knows that he’s alive, because it seems a riduclous thing to be, cut in half as he is. He knows that Qui-Gon is dead, because he can no longer feel him. And he knows that, for the first time in his life, the Force has abandoned him.

When he wakes in the Halls of Healing, absent his training bond and trapped alone in the ringing silence of his own mind, the passage of time is knowable only through pain. At night he is sedated, at peace; during the day he begs the healers to let him die, _please, please_ , cold hands and serene faces and distant minds that move him through the motions of physical therapy that he does not want, that plunge him in and out of bacta, in and out of the cocooning pressure of submerged semi-awareness; _The change would be easier to process, with a bond_ , the mind-healer says, once he’s lucid enough to be subjected to her tender mercies, _but I can teach you to weather it without one_.

Give me a bond, Obi-Wan wants to ask, but doesn’t. He’s learned that it’s no use asking for things from people who’ve already decided what you need and what they’re going to give you. Anyways, as much respect as he has for his fellow jedi, he’s not sure he could stand to share this with anyone but his master -- and his master is dead.

“Located the Sith, Shadow Vos has,” Master Yoda says, voice grim. “Go to them, you will. In the ways of the dark side, seek to be trained.”

“The dark side? Master -- “

“Fall, you must.”

“I -- _Fall?_ ” Obi-Wan echoes.

“The Council knows it’s a lot to ask, Shadow Kenobi,” Master Windu cuts in. “If you feel that the task is beyond you, we’ll find someone else to do it. But you’re our best option.”

 _Why?_ Obi-Wan wants to ask, but doesn’t. The version of him that once might have questioned the Council has been tempered by age, by experience. By repeated denial.

Instead he says, “Even if my fellow knights would believe it of me, why should the Sith trust the truth of my approach? Dooku will lob my head off the second I’m within range.”

“Believe you, they will,” Yoda assures him.

“ _Why?_ ” Obi-Wan asks aloud, before he can catch himself.

Wordlessly, Mace keys up a hologram. It’s zoomed-in orbital footage of the palace at Serenno -- Obi-Wan knows enough to recognize his grandmaster’s home. On the vast balcony in front of the main hall, the tiny figure of Dooku moves through familiar katas of second form, his lightsaber a bright holo-blue light in his hands.

And beside him another figure moves -- taller, broader. More fluid in his movements. Obi-Wan recognizes the strange, easy Ataru before he recognizes the man, but that’s not surprising. The man could’ve been simply standing there, and Obi-Wan would have recognized him by the way he held himself. Reserved, quiet. A kind face on a deep well of wild Force energy.

“Alive, your old master is,” he hears Yoda say from far away, as Qui-Gon reaches the end of the kata and turns, smiling, robes flapping in an invisible wind. “Go to him, you will. In you, restore his trust.”

 _And betray him,_ he doesn’t say, but Obi-Wan hears it anyways. _Betray him_.

The mind-healer teaches him to close down the memories of his experience. She helps him build a fort in the center of his mind, a strongbox where he must never go, where he stores the Theed generator complex. Where he stores his time in the dark. Where he stores Qui-Gon -- the happy memories, as well as the memory of his death. Once those things are taken care of, tucked away, out of sight, the mind-healer moves to the new demands of his body.

 _It will always hurt,_ the healers tell him. _There’s nothing to be done. Let the pain remind you that you are alive, Knight Kenobi_. _Let it center you_.

Obi-Wan wants to tell them to go kriff themselves, but he’s more clear-headed these days, and he’s remembered that he’s a jedi. The Force has come crawling back to him like a penitent spouse, and when he manages to wedge his way past the limits of his conscious mind into some sort of meditation, he’s almost comfortable. He’s as close as he gets, anyways, now that the healers have stopped sedating him at night.

 _Pain is in the mind, Obi,_ Siri Tachi reminds him, trying to sound bright and optimistic when she comes to visit. _You can get through this. I know you’ll get through this_. She doesn’t offer to help him, and he doesn’t miss the omission, but he can’t blame her for it. He’s found that most people, even his friends, are made uncomfortable by the severity of his wound. _Obi-Wan_ is made uncomfortable by the severity of his wound -- not the pain of it, which he’s beginning to think he can learn to live with, but the alienness of it, the way it has turned him into a being not quite human, but something _other_.

His nerves, between his shoulderblades and his pelvis, are connected by wires. Most of his organs are synthetic. It takes longer than usual for his legs to respond to orders from his mind -- an infinitisemal split-second, but still. Digestion is, at present, a trial. He has not tried to have an orgasm yet but he anticipates it being a singularly strange and unpleasant experience. The only evidence on his skin is the red, papery scar tissue from the lightsaber burn that cauterized the wound enough to keep him alive, but inside the change is extensive. World-altering. Obi-Wan has been shunted sideways out of the life he knew.

 _Before Naboo. After Naboo_. With a dark, blank space in the middle -- but he’s learned his lesson well. He never looks in the box.

“Padawan,” Qui-Gon says, very softly.

Obi-Wan sometimes thinks that he experiences life as a series of impacts. Feet on the ground. Heart inside his sternum. Training staff to the back of the head. Desperation to _No_ , begging to _No,_ self to _No,_ _No, No,_ Maul’s ’saber to the loose unprepared muscle of his gut, waking just in time to hit the floor, feverish with pain in the empty void of his master’s old room, _Go,_ says the Council, _Go, Shadow Kenobi, Go away from here, Go away from us, Go alone,_ crash-landing in the bare landscapes of dark shadowy planets, buffeted from smoky unreputable room to smoky unreputable room as he chews himself up and spits himself out in service to the Order.

 _How do I act like a Sith?_ he’d asked Quinlan before leaving the Temple, hoods up and heads bent close in a deserted corridor. His old créchemate had clapped him on the shoulder -- _smack_ \-- and said, _Easy, Obi. Every time you want to release your emotions to the Force…don’t_.

 _Easy_. Easy.

And here Obi-Wan stands, before his former master, his master who he thought dead for nearly a decade, the warm breeze of Serenno moving their robes around their ankles, the Force gone silent between them in something like anticipation, and to hear his voice is like another impact, straight to the core. Obi-Wan wants to redirect it, let the shock be absorbed into the Force, but he remembers what Quinlan said, so he doesn’t.

He lets it hit him. Feels it crack the strongbox at the center of his mind.

“ _Padawan,_ ” Qui-Gon says again, sounding on the brink of something, and takes a halting step forward. “Obi-Wan.”

For the first time in nearly a decade, someone has said Obi-Wan’s name. _His name,_ the name of his soul, not just a strange series of sounds meant to identify him.

“Master,” he says, breaking.

He would fall, but Qui-Gon is there to catch him. He holds Obi-Wan’s face close against the sheltering warmth of his chest, where Obi-Wan can hear his heartbeat and feel the ebb and flow of his familiar Force signature, somehow unchanged, and they sink to the cool flagstones of the balcony.

“It’s you,” Qui-Gon says wonderingly, lips moving against Obi-Wan’s hair. “I can feel that it’s you, but how…? I thought you were dead.”

“I thought the same of you,” Obi-Wan manages. He feels as if something inside him has been cleaved violently in two. As if his heart is leaking.

“They conspired to hide us from each other,” Qui-Gon murmurs.

There’s something low and dangerous in his voice that Obi-Wan has never heard before, but he finds he cannot think on that now. Now, he can only cling to his master, knees aching on the stone, shaky with emotion he is unaccustomed to letting himself feel, and weep.

Some time later, they sit cross-legged with their knees touching in the humming Force-life of the palace’s garden. The sun has gone down. It’s been many hours since they met on the balcony, but they haven’t let go of each other. Qui-Gon’s hands rest one on the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, one on his cheek, palm big enough to blanket the side of his face. Obi-Wan clings to the front of Qui-Gon’s black robes. His eyes are closed. He doesn’t want to have to see the yellow of his master’s gaze. He wants to forget, just for a few moments. The Force, it seems, has decided to let him. Apart from a faint, hissing tendril of unease, Qui-Gon feels as he always did.

His touch, his thumb moving over Obi-Wan’s cheek -- it feels as it always did. And his voice sounds as it always did.

“When I woke I was with Maul on his ship,” he tells Obi-Wan, voice low enough that only they two can hear -- not that there’s anyone else here to hear them, but Obi-Wan’s work as a Shadow, and apparently Qui-Gon’s tenure as a Sith, has cautioned them both that sometimes a listener is not necessarily seen. “If I had known, dear heart…if I had known you still lived…”

“I know,” Obi-Wan assures him. “Our bond broke. You couldn’t have known.”

“Maul must have broken it,” Qui-Gon muses. “I remember feeling him in my mind -- “

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agrees, heart in his throat. “Yes, I felt him, too.”

“I killed him, in transit from Naboo,” Qui-Gon says, as if it’s nothing. As if it’s something he feels proud of, to have taken the life of another. “I avenged you.”

“I was…” Obi-Wan starts, then finds that he can say no more. His throat is blocked with tears. Qui-Gon shushes him, presses a gentle kiss to his forehead. “Peace, dear one.”

“ _Peace,_ ” Obi-Wan echoes, with a laugh.

He pulls away from Qui-Gon’s hands, opening his eyes. Mere inches away, his master stares back at him, his eyes a bright, nauseating yellow. “How can I have peace?” he demands. “You left me, Master.”

Qui-Gon shakes his head, incredulous. “I didn’t know.”

“You fell,” Obi-Wan says.

Qui-Gon’s expression closes down. He folds his hands in his lap, straightens his spine, putting distance between them. “I made a choice,” he says. His voice is tense.

“Was it because of me? Because I died?”

“No,” Qui-Gon says, too fast, and then perhaps noticing the sting of his words -- how strange that a Sith should care -- amends, “Not entirely.”

“Why, then?” Obi-Wan asks. The Council might call it a miscalculated move, later, if he lived to submit an after-action report, and he knows that from a certain point of view it seems to be too much too fast, but Qui-Gon _knows_ him, and there is no version of Obi-Wan that would not want the answer to this question. That wouldn’t need to understand.

Qui-Gon doesn’t answer, though. He looks back at Obi-Wan, a steady, penetrating look. Nine years ago it might have been the look he graced his padawan with after Obi-Wan posed a particularly vexing question -- something Qui-Gon suspected came from Tahl or Micah as a joke, not his straightlaced, overgrown youngling. Or after Obi-Wan had a night out with his friends, waking up an hour later than usual with a pounding headache and someone else’s saliva drying on his stomach, Qui-Gon standing imperiously in the kitchen with a fresh kettle and _this look_ , which Obi-Wan always suspected, then, meant that Qui-Gon knew exactly what Obi-Wan had been picturing that made him come like a sledgehammer in Quinlan’s mouth.

In these gardens, in this palace plagued by shadows, far removed from the easy camaraderie of his apprenticeship, Obi-Wan does not know what this look means. He does not know if he has to be afraid of it.

He isn’t. He’s never been afraid of Qui-Gon. Nervous of him, sure. Startled by him, of course. But _afraid_? He’s not sure he knows how.

“Why did you come here, padawan?” Qui-Gon asks.

Obi-Wan, in his years as a man of many masks, has discovered that the best way to pretend to be someone else is to be as much yourself as possible.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “When I learned you were alive…the distance seemed untenable.”

_Pain is in the mind,_ Obi-Wan reminds himself, as muscle spasms drive him to curl in a tight ball in the corner of his room on the desert moon of Jedha. _Pain is in the mind,_ shivering and wracked with electrical spasms as his circuitry malfunctions on a landing pad in the pouring rain of Kamino. _Pain is in the mind,_ floating anonymously through Bespin, Utapau, Geonosis, leaving nothing in his wake but vague memories of a charming smile and a Coruscanti accent, but he knows by now that the thing about pain being in the mind is that it is only ever in _your own_ mind.

Pain cannot be shared. The experience of pain cannot be communicated. Obi-Wan is separated from the beings around him by the bodily reality of his sundered abdomen; he has been trapped inside his skeleton and the slick suit of his musculature, unable to externalize.

Obi-Wan hurts. Obi-Wan also _hungers,_ but at least he hungers _for_ something; he thirsts, but he thirsts _for_ something; he yearns, but he yearns _for_ something. When he hurts, he only hurts. He has nowhere to put it. It’s easy to release love to the Force, because all that means is releasing the object of that love, but what can he do when he’s been instructed to release his pain? His pain is a part of him. To release it would be to release a part of himself. To exist in its absence would be impossible.

Dooku is absent from Serenno for the moment, for which Obi-Wan is grateful. His presence would be a complicating element that Obi-Wan is not yet on steady enough ground to deal with properly; he would likely find himself less his head before Qui-Gon managed to get one word out in his favor. Assuming Qui-Gon would speak in his favor.

As he has not immediately called his dark master home to deal with the _threat_ , Obi-Wan likes to think that he would. He likes to think that the Qui-Gon with whom he’s sharing space is the genuine article, not an impressive facsimile, a mere imitation of his former self -- he thinks that it’s strange, that Qui-Gon should be so unchanged, but at the same time he knows that his old master is not _wholly_ the same.

Freed from the fetters of the Jedi Code, Qui-Gon seems a more vibrant version of himself. To even have the thought feels nearly sacrilegious, treason of a mild and insidious order, but Obi-Wan is finding it difficult to deny what is right in front of his face. Qui-Gon is quick to laughter, like he was when Obi-Wan knew him, but seems no quicker to anger than he’s ever been; he still has a steady, rock-solid core of serenity which Obi-Wan was amused to discover has leant itself to his reborn Sith title.

At latemeal he speaks often of how his embracing of the dark side has allowed him to more fully give himself over to the will of the Living Force.

“The Force in its wild state does not differentiate light and dark, padawan,” he informs Obi-Wan sagely. “We flesh and blood beings -- we are the ones who decide what is light, and what is dark. But one cannot exist without the other. They are as the fish who swam before the universe. Yin and yang. Perfectly balanced, but only as a pair.”

“So you haven’t abandoned the light completely?” Obi-Wan asks, more teasing than hopeful.

Qui-Gon chuckles, shaking his head. “Always pushing, aren’t you? Apparently some things never change.” He looks up at Obi-Wan, eyes searing gold. “I assure you, dear one, there is as much light in me as there is dark in you.”

“None, then?” Obi-Wan says, and Qui-Gon chuckles again.

His master still loves plants. His rooms are populated with them to the extent that trying to navigate them is like passing through a jungle, so that Obi-Wan is always sticky with mist and ambient humidity by the time he leaves.

They meditate together in the mornings, and spar on the balcony in the afternoon, and in the long meandering spaces of time in between, they talk. Obi-Wan tells Qui-Gon what he can of his work for the Order, walking a fine line between not betraying sensitive information and not letting on that he still wishes to protect said information, and Qui-Gon in return tells him much of daily life and Sith theory but very little of his and Dooku’s hand in the coming war.

It’s to be expected, Obi-Wan supposes. There can only be so much trust between a jedi and a Sith -- even two such as they.

Qui-Gon is, as he has always been, much larger than life. He occupies every facet of Obi-Wan’s waking senses and a good portion of his dreams -- the ones that aren’t nightmares, at least. He is fiercer and more brutal in battle but no less elegant for it, still fights with an economy of movement which lends itself to his enormous frame. He is a vast, windless ocean at the edges of Obi-Wan’s mental shields, deep and still, and when Obi-Wan feels him in the very early morning, when he’s just coming awake, blinking new and helpless as a child, it is very hard for him to remember that this is not the same teacher who shepherded him through his apprenticeship.

This is not the Qui-Gon who brewed him tea each morning for more than ten years, nor the Qui-Gon to whom he brought his every fear and worry for redress like scraped knees, nor the Qui-Gon with whom he had once been deeply, irreparably in love.

That man died on Naboo. That man’s Obi-Wan died with him. Here, now, this Obi-Wan will soon be called upon to betray this Qui-Gon -- for reasons he remembers less and less with every passing day.

“You were the center of my universe,” Obi-Wan confesses one morning.

Qui-Gon tilts his head, staring at him with that strange yellow gaze. Obi-Wan is beginning to get used to the color of his eyes. Qui-Gon’s hair is loose around his face. Obi-Wan wants to gather it back for him. Braid it, maybe. His master used to let him do that sometimes, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, humming vibrations that Obi-Wan could feel through the pads of his fingers on Qui-Gon’s scalp --

“Am I not, anymore?” Qui-Gon asks. He doesn’t sound hurt. Only curious.

“I thought you were dead,” Obi-Wan says, instead of giving him an answer. It’s an issue he’s been avoiding in the privacy of his own mind; he’s hardly going to solve it now, aloud.

“Hmm,” Qui-Gon says. “What replaced me, then?”

The cool, dew-fragrant breeze of Serenno breathes through the open window. Obi-Wan is, in a sick twist of fate, as far from pain and suffering as he has been since he was knighted, sitting here with a Sith. In any respect he feels much safer with his old master than he ever felt with the mind-healers. So he admits what he has never admitted to another living soul. He raises his hand to his stomach and presses it there, to the ’saber scar he can locate even through thick layers of robes, and says, “This.”

Qui-Gon sucks in a breath. “ _Padawan…_ ”

“I know I ought to say the Order, or my work as a Shadow -- “

“No, dear one.” Qui-Gon seems to shift towards him without moving, all his energy adjusting to place Obi-Wan at its center, like a protective Force shield. “There is no _ought to_ here, not between us. You know that.”

Obi-Wan blinks rapidly. He feels twelve years old. He feels utterly unbefitting the title of Jedi Knight. “I’m sorry. I rarely speak of this.”

“Obi-Wan -- “

“It’s in the past. It does not matter.”

“ _Of course it matters,_ ” Qui-Gon says, voice too loud.

He seems to notice his own volume as soon as he’s spoken, and quiets himself, his Force signature settling back down after a wild spike of darkness that left Obi-Wan breathless. He drags a hand over his mouth, staring out the window, eyes red-ringed, then turns back to Obi-Wan and says, “You think your pain is not real because others do not experience it. Is that it?”

Obi-Wan stares at him, wide eyed.

“It’s not true,” Qui-Gon urges, reaching out to touch Obi-Wan’s face very, very softly. “Your pain is real, Obi-Wan. What you feel is real. It matters.”

Tears spill over Obi-Wan’s eyes.

It feels like sacrilege -- but also, the Force humming and tightening close around them, it feels like the only thing Obi-Wan can possibly do, the only right thing in the world, to turn his lips against Qui-Gon’s palm. He’s crying, has to open his mouth against Qui-Gon’s skin to suck in a thick, snotty breath, but Qui-Gon breathes out hard, a veritable gale given his size, and pulls Obi-Wan in closer. “Oh, dear heart,” he murmurs, “oh, my dear -- “

And for the second time since his arrival, Obi-Wan can only cling to him, and weep.

_AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH,_ Obi-Wan wishes he could scream, a thousand million times -- wishes he had a word for, so he didn’t have to scream, so he could whisper it to Qui-Gon in the night, but he can’t, he doesn’t.

Sleep in the palace on Serenno cracks the strongbox of Obi-Wan’s trauma wide open, because it is a sleep the likes of which he has not known since he was a youngling in the créche, small and warm and happy with trust that the next day would be better than the last -- the deep, easy sleep of those who do not spend their days in mortal peril, who do not have to sleep with their ’saber close to their fingertips in case they should need to spring up and run at a moment’s notice. He lies in the plush expanse of his bed and feels Qui-Gon all around him even though Qui-Gon is nearly a full wing away, even though their training bond lies dormant still, rope frayed to a million threads by the trauma of its splitting. He feels Qui-Gon; his mind feels Qui-Gon and assumes that it is safe to open the box and have a look around, because Obi-Wan never thought to train himself out of trusting a dead man.

 _Show me,_ snakes hiss in his mind, burrowing, winding through his limbs and through his insides, scales sliding over soft, pale-white intestine and gelatinous tubes of wire; _Show me,_ and he does. He dreams of Maul, of Theed, the horror of staring at his own severed legs and the horror -- somehow worse -- of understanding that he had survived their loss. _You could have sucked yourself off,_ Quinlan had said in a poor attempt at humor, when he visited Obi-Wan in the Halls, and Obi-Wan had locked that away but he remembers it now, comes awake laughing one night with tears in his eyes and Qui-Gon’s discontent roiling nauseatingly around him. That’s probably the most pleasant thing to resurface.

But the rest, Qui-Gon weathers as well, and Obi-Wan lets him, like he let Qui-Gon soothe him when he woke from a vision as a padawan, looming large and comforting as he sat on the edge of Obi-Wan’s bed, or on the meditation mat with his knees drawn up to his chest, humming. _Show me, padawan,_ he used to say, _so that I can understand, and so that you’ll believe me when I tell you there’s nothing to fear._

And Obi-Wan did, and Obi-Wan does, and one night he wakes screaming and Qui-Gon is there, sitting beside him, stroking his hair and holding him tight against his chest, rocking back and forth like the ebb and flow of the tide, saying, “I know, dear one. I know.”

Obi-Wan has always thought of love as hunger. He had resigned himself to starvation because there was no alternative. He had gotten used to living with a gaping maw at the center of him, groaning always to be fed, gotten used to maneuvering around it, to avoiding it, ignoring it. Qui-Gon was dead. There was nothing to be done. To look directly into the maw, the empty void, to nurse it or think of it or let it control him, would be to open himself to the influence of the dark side.

Obi-Wan was not many things, anymore. He found that pain had reduced him. But he was still a Jedi Knight. Still a Shadow. If looked, if he _fell_ , he would be Hunger all; Starvation all.

On Isthmus he listened to the old women with their raspy splintering voices wail the collective _ULULULULULULulululu_ of lost love, of sons sent to war never returning, husbands felled by rootrot and mothers ripped in childbirth from back to the Force like torn fingernails, fast and bloody and stinging to the quick -- he sat and he listened and he tried to find words to codify what they were feeling without looking directly at the truth that he knew, that he felt it himself, that he did not need words to understand. Obi-Wan was a Shadow, but on that small rainy planet he very nearly became a man again -- a man halved by pain, guided by hunger.

Now he hears that haunting ululātus as he drifts awake in the dark cradle of night, his lost love returned and slumbering just down the hall, and thinks _I am not strong enough. I am not strong enough to continue starving._

“They want me to betray you,” he tells Qui-Gon.

The palace is quiet. The stars are silent in the night sky. Obi-Wan’s heart is screaming in his chest. Qui-Gon, though it’s the middle of the night and Obi-Wan has just pounded frantically on his door, looks wide awake and perfectly aware. Perhaps it’s because Obi-Wan hasn’t slept -- perhaps he felt it.

“Come in,” he says, voice hushed, and ushers Obi-Wan inside.

Logically, in what part of his brain is still thinking like a jedi and not a thing that wants Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan knows that this is when the Sith should kill him. This is when Qui-Gon’s red lightsaber should illuminate the jungle behind him, when it should come down across Obi-Wan’s spine like a scythe. But Obi-Wan cannot believe it of him. He will not. If Qui-Gon sees fit to kill him now, he will go willingly. The alternative is unthinkable.

“Betray me how?” Qui-Gon asks, when they’re in the dim sanctum of his bedroom.

Obi-Wan turns to face him. He feels like every piecemeal nerve ending in his body is standing alert, waiting for something -- a lightning strike, maybe. An act of nature. Qui-Gon’s face is limned in moonlight. Obi-Wan can’t see the color of his eyes, but he can see the shape of him. His beloved face. _Master,_ Obi-Wan thinks, for the first time since he’s arrived, tears springing to his eyes. _Oh, Master. It’s really you._

“I was to earn your trust,” he confesses, when he can breathe again. “Train as a Sith. Return to the Order as a double agent, feeding you false information on the war effort.”

Qui-Gon laughs. “And they thought that would work?”

“I like to think they did,” Obi-Wan says quietly. “Otherwise they just sent me here as-- I don’t know. Some sort of sacrificial lamb.”

“ _Padawan._ ” Qui-Gon is suddenly there, taking Obi-Wan’s head carefully in his hands, turning his face to look up at him. “Leave them. Leave the Order.”

Obi-Wan pulls away from him. “I can’t.”

“ _Obi-Wan,_ ” Qui-Gon says, frustrated. “Listen to the Force. What did I teach you -- “

“ _Teach me?_ ” Obi-Wan scoffs, incredulous. “You taught me not to kriffing _fall,_ for one. And I hardly think listening to the Force has anything to do with it -- “

“The Force does not want us to live as half of ourselves,” Qui-Gon cuts in, infuriatingly calm.

Obi-Wan stops, suddenly drained of energy, and turns to look at him.

“The Force does not want us to deny what we are,” Qui-Gon continues, coming towards him slowly, like he’s approaching a spooked animal. His hand slides up Obi-Wan’s arm, over his shoulder, to hold the side of his neck. “The Order would have you ignore the parts of you that cry out for love, for comfort. That want to hold, to keep…”

“Master,” Obi-Wan murmurs, then finds one last kernel of defiance inside him. “You should think before you accuse me of things you’re guilty of too.”

Qui-Gon’s golden eyes crinkle in a smile. “If you leave the Jedi, dear one, I shall be happy to leave the Sith.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan breathes. He wasn’t expecting that.

“My master kept you from me, as much as your Order kept me from you.” He runs his fingers through Obi-Wan’s overlong hair, combing it away from his face. “I think neither of them are deserving of our allegiance.”

Qui-Gon’s voice is a low, seductive rumble. Lightning strikes in Obi-Wan’s heart. He’s been starving for a long time. He pulls Qui-Gon down, his master bending like the ripe green bow of a young tree under his hands -- and bites into his mouth.

There has always been something comforting to Obi-Wan about the sheer size of Qui-Gon, in space and in the Force. He is all-encompassing. As a Sith he is even more so, because he does not try to rein it in, like he used to do -- he is wild, primordial, a well of Force energy the size of a small moon as he presses Obi-Wan down into the body-warm nest of his bed. Stripped of his robes, he is no smaller a creature; he is huge, primeval, as if Obi-Wan has wandered into bed with a rancor instead of a man, and the intensity of his attentions leaves Obi-Wan’s mind trembling and clumsy with want.

 _Qui-Gon,_ he breathes, reverent, across the wobbly newborn bridge of a bond rebuilding itself from memory, as Qui-Gon frames his sides with his hands and laves wet kisses across the pink, delicate skin of his scar. _Qui-Gon,_ gasping without air as his master takes him in his mouth, hair hanging to frame the obscene picture of his lips around the head of Obi-Wan’s cock, and Obi-Wan can do nothing but bury his hands in that hair and rush across the bond on a desperate wave of feeling as the twitchy nerve endings in his pelvis tug and tingle, misinterpreting half of the pleasure as pain.

To Obi-Wan, sex feels like _tightening,_ these days -- tightening and tightening and tightening to one glorious breaking point, a breaking point which he can always anticipate from a strange jerk in his abdomen and an involuntary flinch in his right knee, and he tries to tug Qui-Gon off but the old master only hums and says _dear one_ through the bond, and Obi-Wan is hit with such a wave of pure, blinding relief -- that he’s not alone, that Qui-Gon is here, that he does not have to scream uselessly into the void for _one more second_ \-- that it carries him clear over the edge -- that he comes with a sound he’s never heard himself make before, a wordless cry overflowing.

 _I have you,_ Qui-Gon soothes -- out loud or over the bond, Obi-Wan can’t tell. _I have you, dear heart. Be at peace._

And, “Peace,” Obi-Wan echoes, laughing. “You are the antithesis of peace, my dear master.” But Qui-Gon leans up to kiss him, rumbling happily, mouth still tasting of Obi-Wan’s spend, and Obi-Wan knows that’s not true at all.

**Author's Note:**

> "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." -Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain


End file.
